A Pop-History Profile of Hostess’s Iconic Twinkie, May It Forever Rest

Where were you when you heard the news that Hostess was shutting down? I was on my Twitter feed, wondering why so many people were suddenly making Twinkie jokes. (E.g., “There are still plenty left in Chelsea . . .”).

By way of requiem, VF.com would like to offer this link, via Google books, to a three-part article Spy magazine published in July 1989. The first part, “Twinkie, Twinkie, Little Suet-Filled Sponge Cake Crisco Log, Now I Know Just What You Are,” by Jane and Michael Stern, is a history of the Twinkie—as well as a counter-history of the home cooks who have been obsessed over the years with divining the industrial secrets of the official Twinkie recipe, then re-creating the snack cakes in their own kitchens. An excerpt, as the Sterns attempt to make authentic “creamy filling”:

Into our food processor went everything on [the] list. The lard was pretty—a soapy-white block of clarified hog fat. The suet, however, was horrifying—a blood-streaked loaf of adipose cattle tissue that looked like it might be waste from a liposuction clinic. To make it less scary, we asked our butcher to grind the suet into a wormy mound. We beat and whipped the whole mess for 15 minutes.

The sight of it made us gag. Our drugstore lecithin had turned the filling a grim beige. And we hadn't used enough artificial butter flavor to disguise the aroma of uncooked fat. The flavor was horrifically fleshy, such as only a cannibal could love, but with enough corn syrup sweetness to numb the tongue.

The second part of the article, “Every Which Way But Good,” by Rachel Urquhart, recounted a Twinkie bake-off in which six New York City pastry chefs were invited to a competition to see who could come closest to the perfection of the original. Among the criteria used in judging:

Color—the original Twinkies are cast in the same perfectly even, golden hue as Walt Disney’s Pluto

Skin residue—a slippery yet slightly gummy film left on the palm and fingers after handling . . .

The final part of this triptych, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, or Food,” by yours truly, took the form of a lab report summarizing a series of rigorous Twinkie experiments. The conclusion:

Contrary to the expectations of skeptics, Twinkies did exhibit some of the usual properties of a nutritive substance—noticeably going "stale" on a windowsill and blackening when exposed to heat and microwave radiation. On the other hand, the Twinkie's survival of a 120-foot drop, along with some of the unusual phenomena observed in connection with the "creamy filling" and artificial coloring, should give pause to those observers who would unequivocally categorize Twinkies as “food.”